Description: There will always be an England, no doubt, but what sort of England will it be? Armed only with insatiable curiosity, a tiny car and Mary Carson, a speed-rapping and indefatigable young Irishwoman who serves as his Sancho Panza, Cohn takes a long wild ride through a country he calls the Republic. It isn't the England of rolling green hills and cricket and afternoon tea on the lawn, but a nation within a nation, populated by the many millions who have either fallen out of the British mainstream, or chosen to jump. He meets the rising stars of a new culture, and also the casualties. Their collected stories, both weird and wonderful, combine to form a tapestry quite unlike any notion of England that has ever existed before. It is a land made up, among others, of outlaws and insurgents, rampaging natives, second-generation immigrants, visionaries, born-agains, football fans, fetishists, gays, New Age travelers, anarchists, DJs, street fighters, graffiti artists, Rastas, Odinists, Elvis impersonators, fire-swallowers and even the Antichrist. Loud and angry, hilarious and charged with furious energy, their voices define a world cut loose from tradition and all certainty. Gone bananas, in fact. Nik Cohn's republic may not be the only England out there. But it's the most vivid.

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